Book review: The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond - reviewed by Wade Davis

Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way. A child raised in the Andes to believe that a mountain is a protective deity will have a relationship with the natural world profoundly different from that of a youth brought up in America to believe a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. The mythology of the Barasana and Makuna people is in every way a land management plan revealing how human beings once thrived in the Amazon rain forest in their millions. Take all the genius that enabled us to put a man on the moon and apply it to an understanding of the ocean, and what you get is Polynesia. Tibetan Buddhism condenses 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind. A lama once remarked that Tibetans do not believe that Americans went to the moon, but they did. Americans may not believe, he added, that Tibetans can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but they do.

The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. 

********

In truth, as the anthropologist WEH Stanner long appreciated, the visionary realm of the Aborigines represents one of the great experiments in human thought. In place of technological wizardry, they invented a matrix of connectivity, an intricate web of social relations based on more than 100 named kin relationships. If they failed to embrace European notions of progress, it was not because they were savages, as the settlers assumed, but rather because in their intellectual universe, distilled in a devotional philosophy known as the Dreaming, there was no notion of linear progression whatsoever, no idealisation of the possibility or promise of change. There was no concept of past, present, or future. In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word for time. The entire purpose of humanity was not to improve anything; it was to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation. Imagine if all of Western intellectual and scientific passion had focused from the beginning of time on keeping the Garden of Eden precisely as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful conversation.

Clearly, had our species as a whole followed the ways of the Aborigines, we would not have put a man on the moon. But, on the other hand, had the Dreaming become a universal devotion, we would not be contemplating today the consequences of climate change and industrial processes that threaten the life supports of the planet.

********

Jared Diamond's failure to grasp that cultures reside in the realm of ideas, and are not simply or exclusively the consequences of climatic and environmental imperatives, is perhaps one reason for the limitations of his new book, The World Until Yesterday, in which he sets out to determine what we in the modern world can learn from traditional societies.

He begins by opportunistically selecting nine topics to explore, limiting the scope of his inquiry from the outset. He examines how indigenous peoples raise their children, treat the elderly, resolve conflicts and manage risk. He addresses the benefits of multilingualism and healthy diets. And he devotes two chapters to the dangers inherent in indigenous life, which lead to a chapter on religion, for "our traditional constant search for the causes of danger may have contributed to religion's origins". From certain of these topics – child rearing, for example – he distills lessons that might be incorporated into "our personal lives". The treatment of older people, healthy lifestyles and multilingualism suggests "models for individuals but also policies that our society as a whole could adopt". The discussion of dispute resolution suggests "policies for our society as a whole".

Diamond is at his best when drawing on his lifetime of fieldwork in New Guinea, home to 1,000 of the world's languages, where his achievements as a naturalist and scholar have been truly remarkable. Stories of his time among the Dani, his years in the field studying birds, his random encounters whether in airport terminals or the most isolated of communities, are humorous and insightful. His observations in any given moment are invariably original and often wise. Yet the lessons he draws from his sweeping examination of culture are for the most part uninspired and self-evident. One could be forgiven for concluding that traditional societies have little more to teach us save that we should embrace healthier diets, include grandparents in child rearing, learn a second language, seek reconciliation not retribution in divorce proceedings, and eat less salt.

Simply put, when it comes to culture, Diamond is on unsteady ground.. Read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/09/history-society